One thing that my father ingrained in me was that I was always to keep learning. I probably never took it to heart, because school always bored me and the way the system was setup, never really motivated me to keep learning. But I see what he’s talking about now that I’ve found something that I truly am passionate about – building an internet startup.
The thing about building an internet startup is that there’s always something to learn. I come across entrepreneurs who are struggling like me, and I always learn some new aspect of the game just by speaking with them. I have a tendency to relate a lot of this back to my experiences in martial arts… when you train in brazillian jiujitsu, every time you spar, there’s an opportunity to learn something new about your own game, regardless of the level of the competition. If they’re better than you, you just learn by defending. If they’re not as good as you, you test out new offense, or put yourself in a really bad spot, and see if you can get out. There’s always something new to learn. I think that’s what I love about being entrepreneur and why I’m so addicted to it, like I am to Brazilian jujitsu (BJJ). There’s always something new to learn about yourself, the game, the competition, the strategy.
Similarly with BJJ, the most important thing is that you spar – or practice what you’re learning. At the end of every class there’s always a sparring session. You can learn all the moves you want to learn, but if you don’t try to actually use it, you don’t learn the finer points in what you’re doing. By sparring, you learn what actually works for you and where you can really apply it. By learning ‘moves’ you just see the 10,000 foot view, instead of seeing the subtle points that help you really nail the position. Just like being an entrepreneur – I can learn about ‘SEO’, but to really nail SEO I have to work at the detail specific to my site.
Just like Fred Wilson recently quoted: “if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited”. I definitely feel like there’s an abundance of awesome resources out there. Some of my favorite entrepreneurial sources are -
A VC – http://www.avc.com – This is Fred Wilson’s blog. He posts pretty frequently about an array of topics. But the way he approaches his comments is the most interesting. Most of the time, he’ll take a moment and write back a response to almost every comment. Most bloggers stop writing backing after the comment stream reaches a large count, but no matter how many there are on Fred’s blog, i’ll see him responding. I think it’s a great example of how to build an great audience for your blog.
Mixergy – http://www.mixergy.com – Mixergy is a daily interview with Entrepreneurs who have crushed it or are in the process of crushing it. Andrew Warner is a great interviewer. It’s awesome, because he doesn’t give them softball questions. He asks the important questions, like ‘What did they learn from their failures to make this current product a success’, ‘Why didn’t that work’, or ‘Why did it work’.
TWiSt – http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/ – i’ll warn you now, Jason is a personality. He’s in your face, loud, obnoxious and doesn’t understand what the word ‘modesty’ means, but he’s probably one of the smartest guys when it comes to seeing opportunities, new ideas and the overall startup game. All of this combined makes the show very entertaining and worth a watch.
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders – iTunes – this is a class every semester at Stanford that presents the most powerful and influential entrepreneurs in the world. Everyone from Zuckerberg to John Doerr have spoken in the class. It’s definitely worth the listen to get perspective from these people.
